Just as Toto yanked the curtain on that pusillanimous poobah in The Wizard of Oz, so have I often felt inclined to expose the bogus bijou benefit that is 3D. Very few films are improved by the process, and some are made demonstrably worse, as in the instances of most 2D-to-3D conversions.

And yet I found myself last Sunday afternoon, on TIFF’s final day, eagerly lining up to see The Wizard of Oz 3D at the Scotiabank Theatres. (The 1939 fantasy classic opens Friday for a brief commercial run to commemorate its 75th anniversary.)

There were a lot of other excited people in the line with me, from young children to seniors. One woman showed me the pair of ruby pumps she had brought with her to wear during the screening, in honor of Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz dozens of times, beginning in my childhood in the 1960s when watching it on my family’s old Electrohome black-and-white TV was an annual tradition. I didn’t even realize that the film was mainly in colour until I turned 11 in 1967, and saw it for the first time on the big screen at North York’s old Willow Theatre (now gone, alas).

My main motivation for going to the TIFF screening was curiosity. Had Warner Bros. spent the money and time needed to do a proper 3D conversion, as James Cameron did two years ago when he unveiled Titanic 3D? Or would it be another horrific quickie, as Paramount’s botched The Last Airbender con job proved?

I also wondered if 21st Century techno-wizards could possibly improve on the original special effects gurus of The Wizard of Oz, who managed to turn a plain nylon stocking into the terrifying twister that lifts young Dorothy Gale from Kansas to Oz.

Happily, it was apparent right from the opening roar of the MGM lion, after TIFF Artistic Director Cameron Bailey had invited us to “feel free to sing along, to click your heels,” that this was no mere rip-and-release project.

The sepia-hued Kansas opener was sharper and brighter than I’d ever seen, and I was knocked out by the clarity of the 3D imaging. You see the added perspective when Dorothy is peering through the wooden boards of her Aunt Em’s farm, and also when Toto is sneaking out of the basket of the furiously cycling dog-napper Almira Gulch.

The value of 3D conversion, and the overall digital clean-up, really comes through when Dorothy’s house crash lands in Munchkinland. It struck me the same way the electric shock goes through the Wicked Witch of the West’s fingers, when she tries to snatch Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

I began to notice colors and details that I hadn’t really seen before, such as how the Wicked Witch comes and goes in an orange cloud of smoke when she makes her dramatic entries and exits. I’d also never previously noted how red the sand is in her hourglass, seen later in the film.

The vastly improved visuals made me much more aware of the artifice of the movie set: the demonstrably fake flowers, the matte landscape paintings in the background.

You can see the makeup on all of the cast, especially the prosthetic lion mask the great Bert Lahr wears as the Cowardly Lion. You can detect where the Yellow Brick Road actually dead-ends into a wall, yet Dorothy goes right up to it as if it runs on without end.

Watching The Wizard of Oz with such clarity also brought the dialogue more alive to me, with its many puns and knowing asides — such as when the brain-deprived Scarecrow observes that, “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they?”

The techno-wizards behind the conversion have been careful not to introduce fake jump scares. The Wicked Witch and her evil flying monkeys don’t fly right into your face, for example, although they now seem even more sinister as they dart and hover above the Kingdom of Oz.

The new 3D version of the film settles once and for all the old rumor about a suicidal munchkin supposedly hanging himself in the Haunted Forest. The grisly rumor began in the 1980s when The Wizard of Oz first came out on VHS tape, and people began noticing something apparently hanging from a tree in the background.

It’s now pretty obvious that the thing in the background is a stork or some other long-necked bird.

The funny thing about The Wizard of Oz 3D is that it really does pull the curtain back on the fact that it’s a film we’re watching, not the illusion of world that so delighted and terrified back when I was a kid. Normally, this would not be a good thing.

But that’s the real magic of this ever-shining gem from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Knowing that it was made without a single computer, and entirely by human ingenuity, makes it all the more worthy of marveling at, 75 years and an added dimension later.